A Knee-Jerk Reaction to Mark Driscoll’s ‘Apology,’ the National Debt and Rupert Murdoch

If you don’t already know the latest Mark Driscoll fiasco, please jump down to the next section. I don’t feel like rehashing the whole thing, for a few reasons, but mostly because it’s depressing to me that a Christian leader continually says ridiculous, hurtful and just plain stupid things. You’d have to illegally monitor most people’s phones (that ones for you, Rupert) to hear them say the things that Mark posts openly on Facebook.

If you are familiar with the whirling dervish that is Mark Driscoll, you’ll know that he issued a pseudo-apology yesterday. It was one of those blog posts that allowed his followers to say, “Attaboy, Mark!” and his detractors to say, “Wait. Was that an apology?”

Out of this whole thing, I found encouragement in one aspect – he has elders who respond to valid complaints and put pressure on him to do something. It is a relief to know that someone so prone to either inadvertent blunders or serial mean-ness at least has a group of people to whom he is accountable.

(By the way, you know what would be cool? If everyone who brought attention to Mark’s stupid Facebook post would sometime in the next few months also bring attention to something good he says or posts. Just saying.)

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Speaking of accountability, aren’t you glad that when our country runs out of money all we have to do is raise our own debt ceiling?

That’s a relief.

In fact, next time I run out of money I’m going to call the bank and say, “Hi, this is Shawn. I’m out of money. I’d like to raise my debt ceiling. Please extend my overdraft protection or issue me a bank-backed credit card.”

Yeah, right. Wouldn’t that be hilarious?

Wait. Most of us already do that. So why are we surprised that our own government, voted into office by a bunch of indebted, credit card addicts (us), are running the place the way most of us run our lives?

We need a debt management makeover, all the way from Mr. Bernanke down to that high school kid writing out his first check.

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But what does all this really have to do with anything? How does Mark’s broken mouth filter and our country’s broken debt filter and Rupert Murdoch’s broken news filter have anything to do with my everyday life?

To me it’s a reminder:

Live simply. Fame and money and power lead to such complicated problems. The writer of Proverbs says that “A pretentious, showy life is an empty life; a plain and simple life is a full life,” and “A simple life in the Fear-of-God is better than a rich life with a ton of headaches.”

5 Comments

Your remarks about fame and money leading to complicated problems is coming at an interesting time for me.

Mark Driscoll’s comments seem downright tame compared to what’s happening with one of his colleagues in the evangelical world. CJ Mahaney, head of Sovereign Grace Ministries, stepped down last week due to (well documented) charges of hypocrisy, pride, deceit, and blackmail, though the blackmail part is conveniently left out of his public statement. I have some background in the Sovereign Grace denomination, and for several years I’ve followed the series of events culminating in this public exposure. The story is so bizarre you could write your next book about it.

I don’t know Mark Driscoll, but the hyperlink you provide suggests to me he’s just one more in a long line of amoral Christianists, such as we’ve seen for the last 30-40 years. Except, it’s gratifying to hear you speak out in opposition to him. Perhaps the tide is turning on Driscoll’s ilk and thinking… But immediately afterward you went off on the right-wing hobby-horse of the debt crisis and offered a spurious parallel to home finance. …The first part of your post represents one of the things that you and your blog excel at.

How is saying that a government is simply a reflection of its constituents either spurious or right-wing? We are a debt culture, across the board, regardless of party affiliation; our government is a deficit government and has been for as long as my young mind can remember, regardless of party.

Scale. Different economic processes affect families than governments, which makes extrapolations from the one to the other of dubious value (at best) — because different economic drivers affect them. And as for why the focus on the debt ceiling is exclusively a right-wing issue, that’s simply true, based on the affiliations and views of those who promote the issue… “[O]ur government is a deficit government and has been for as long as my young mind can remember, regardless of party.” Actually of course, Clinton balanced the budget and handed his successor a budget surplus, which is recent history that I’d guess even the youngest readers of this blog have heard before (whether they allow it to influence their thinking is something else entirely). We live in a time when false equivalences sink our understanding of current events faster than anything else.

Love the “false equivalencies.” So if Clinton’s successor handed the current administration a deficit, that justifies the current administration exponentially ballooning that deficit and blaming it on the previous administration?

As for our government “running out of money,” there is an infinite supply: the fed just prints more! That is what inflation is. It does not mean rising prices. Rising prices are caused by inflation. Inflation is what happens when you print more paper notes and call it money.

And, when you try to pay off your debts with money that is worth less than what you really owe, you have defaulted.